The TRUSTY
SERVANT
NO.120
NOVEMBER 2015
The Headmaster writes:
We print here the address the Headmaster
gave on Goddard Day 2015:
What a Wykehamical King Arthur
Monty Python gave us:
‘Stop. What is your name?’
‘It is Arthur, King of the Britons.’
‘What is your quest?’
‘To seek the Holy Grail.’
‘What is the air-speed velocity of an
unladen swallow?’
‘What do you mean? An African or
European swallow?’
‘Huh? I don’t know that. How do you
know so much about swallows?’
‘Well, you have to know these things
when you’re a king, otherwise people
won’t take you seriously.’
ISIS, called by the commentariat ‘a dark
and medieval vision’. The word is also
commonly applied to severe punishment
(‘these medieval beheadings’), out-of-date
technology (this ‘medieval typewriter’)
and all illiberal attitudes. Or, alternatively,
there is the Monty Python view: the
Middle Ages are allied with ignorant
wickedness, as well as comic derision:
knights immobilised in their armour, fat
monks panting after lascivious nuns,
damsels locked into chastity belts.
We don’t talk about the need for
order much these days; we take it for
granted (though the pictures we see of
asylum seekers pouring into Eastern
Europe from the chronically disordered
Middle East might signal a dramatic return
of disorder into our settled patterns). We
We begin the new academic year
calling to mind with gratitude the
Founder’s gifts: the gift of this lofty and
elegant Chapel, and, even more, the gift
of the School in which we live and learn.
630-odd years is a long time, but to look
at the buildings alone, here and the great
nave of the Cathedral, we can but marvel
at the design and engineering genius of
his medieval mind. When you view these
buildings and when you read the detailed
statutes which the Founder wrote for his
school, the overwhelming impression is
that he was seeking to structure order in a
chronically disordered world.
You might have noticed that the
word medieval has had a revival recently as
an adjective applied to the atrocities of
1
talk much more about our need for, or
indeed right to, happiness. The notion of
happiness has been expressed and
embraced in different ways over time,
going back to the birth of Western
civilisation in ancient Greece. Aristotle,
one of the first to pay significant attention
to the idea, thought that happiness
consisted of being a good person. The
happy life, what the Greeks called
eudaemonia, was one lived ethically, guided
by reason and dedicated to cultivating
one’s virtues. Then, soon after, the
Epicureans connected happiness to simple
pleasure, though they were no mere
physical pleasure-seekers, because they
preached a strict regulation of desire. To be
happy, Epicurus said, he needed no more
than a barley cake and some water. Then
came the Stoics, who, if they believed in
happiness at all, associated it with a
capacity for bravery and endurance in
adversity. And then somewhere in there
was the Greek myth about Narcissus, the
beautiful young man who saw his
reflection in the pool and fell in love with
it. More of him later. In the ancient Near
East, Judaism preached that true happiness
could be found only in a personal
relationship with God the creator; and
then Christianity focused that relationship
in God’s Son Jesus Christ, who walked the
towns of Palestine teaching people about
the nature of divine love. Happiness as
divine love was certainly the framework of
William of Wykeham’s life. To him, real
happiness was discovered in a life of being
faithful to God’s commandments,
expressed in imitation of Jesus in service to